Laurie, who had been some time silent, looked up from the tract he had seemed to be reading. “I suppose the polite comeback would be ‘No, but I should like you to save me.’ ” He flipped the paper over quickly. “Do you believe in hell?”
Andrew, who was holding a frond of fern against the sky, said, “Well, I should think your opinion would be the one worth having.”
At twenty-three, one is not frightened off a conversation merely by the fear of its becoming intense. But intensity can be a powerful solvent of thin and brittle protective surfaces, and at twenty-three one is well aware of this. Laurie looked around at the pale gentle sunshine, the ripe fruit mildly awaiting its passive destiny, sleeping around the life in the core.
“Don’t ask me,” he said. “I’m just a do-it-yourself amateur. Boys! Get this smashing outfit and make your own hell. Complete with tools and easy instructions. Not a toy, but a real working model which will take in your friends and last for years. Or isn’t that what you meant?”
“Yes, I suppose it is. I’m taking advantage of you, you see, because you give me the chance. What’s the joke?”
“Nothing. It’s the sun in my eyes. Go on.”
“Oh, it’s just that you could tell me so much I ought to know; but I don’t know if you want to think about it any more.”
“No, it’s all right.” Laurie pulled a long tassel of field grass and slid the smooth seeds off the stem. “Carry on, what is it?”
“Well, for instance—when it started, did you have any doubt about what you’d do?”
“No, I don’t think so. I mean, of course, I thought the whole thing was a bloody muckup and ought to have been prevented. But then it just seemed something that had happened to one, like getting caught in the rain.” Now for the first time he realized how important it had been not to admit any alternative to the hard, decent, orthodox choice which need not be regarded as a choice at all; how important not to be different. “Probably,” he said, striving for honesty, “I didn’t think too much in case it got awkward. I can’t remember now. Of course, one had other sorts of doubt. What would become of one, not just that sort of thing”—he jerked a quick thumb at the crutch half buried in the grass—“but what one would turn into, how one would make out. You know.”
“Yes, of course. Has it been like you thought?”
“No, not really. Months of boredom, followed by a sort of nightmare version of one of those ghastly picnics where all the arrangements break down. One thing, it shakes you out of that sort of basic snobbery which makes you proud of not being a snob. On the other hand it doesn’t alter your own tastes, I mean things like music, and however you look at it the people round you don’t share them, and when you feel less superior it seems you feel more lonely. Except in action, of course, which is what one’s there for but for me it didn’t last very long.”
“You’ve got a sense of proportion out of it, though you didn’t say that.”
“It’s a very limited one, I assure you.”
Suddenly Andrew sat up, and clasped his bare arms around his knees. His face had hardened with some inward resolution. He was looking straight before him; his profile, firm, intent, and for a moment absolutely still, had a clear austerity imposed on a latent sweetness, which seemed to Laurie unbearably beautiful. As he looked away Andrew turned around. “We can’t go on like this, can we?”
“Meaning?” said Laurie. His heart gave a racing start that almost choked him. The sky, the water, the fine leaves through which the late sun was shining, had the supernal brightness which precedes a miracle.
“You know what I mean. What about your question? Am I afraid to fight? After all, you’ve got a right to know.”
Laurie couldn’t speak for a few seconds. The lift and the drop had been too much. Then he remembered how silence might be taken. “Good God, what bull, I’ve never thought of it. Anyway, if you were you wouldn’t bring it up.”
“Why not? It would still be just as important. Actually, of course, the answer is I don’t know. It’s not a thing you can know in theory. I wish I did know for certain, naturally one would rather have it proved. But that only matters to me. I mean, the lightness of a thing isn’t determined by the amount of courage it takes. It must have taken a lot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, for instance.”
“Fair enough. I should think more crimes have probably been committed by chaps with inferiority complexes trying to demonstrate their virility, than even for money.”
“Well, about six months before the war started I went off walking for a week to think about all this. It was rather a shock to the Friends that I could have doubts, but they were wonderful about it, especially Dave. I thought all around it. I thought there might conceivably even be some circumstances when I felt it was right to kill. If I knew whom I was killing and the circumstances and the nature of the responsibility. What I finally stuck at was surrendering my moral choice to men I’d never met, about whose moral standards I knew nothing whatever.”
“Yes, I know; but in Napoleon’s day if you wanted to cross the Channel in the middle of the war and talk sensibly to the enemy there was almost nothing to stop you. Even in 1914 they had the Christmas Truce and it very nearly worked. Nowadays we’re all sealed off in airtight cans and there’s nothing between war and surrender. You can’t convert a propaganda machine.”
“ ‘Machine’ is journalese.” Often in his concentration he made statements whose brusqueness he didn’t notice. “Inexact terms like that are part of the war psychosis. People are never machines, even when they want to be. You have to start somewhere.”
“Only an awful lot of innocent people are going to suffer meanwhile.”
“I know,” said Andrew. “That’s the whole crux, of course.” His blue eyes stared at the moving water. “One could say, which is true, that war’s such a boomerang it’s impossible to guarantee anyone’s protection in the long run. We went into this to protect Poland, and look what’s happening to the Poles now. But that would really be side-stepping the issue. It’s a very terrible responsibility, or it would be if one had to take it without help.”
“Whose help did you ask, then?” asked Laurie rather coldly. He had not been pleased by the introduction of Dave’s name a few minutes before, and jealousy made him stupid. Andrew’s meaning broke on him, devastatingly, a second too late.
“Sorry,” he said with difficulty. “I really am a clod. Have you been a Quaker—a Friend I mean—all your life?”
“I’m not a very good one; please don’t judge the Society by me.”
“Your people don’t belong, then?”
“No, they’ve always been soldiers.”
“God! This must have been difficult for you.”
“Not compared with a lot of others. I’ll tell you about my father sometime; but now I’d rather talk about you.”
Laurie sat for a few moments collecting his thoughts. Presently he said, “I never can put these things very well. But I suppose, though it sounds cockeyed, I don’t fancy the idea of a State where your lot would all be rotting in concentration camps. I know you’d be ready to go there and I suppose that ought to alter my feeling, but it doesn’t, so there you are.”
“It should,” said Andrew. His face had stiffened and the light in it was gone. Now he looked just a stubborn boy with good bones and a brown skin.
Laurie took the point. He saw how it is possible to idealize people for one’s own delight, while treading on their human weaknesses like dirt. “Look,” he said, “get this straight. I’m not trying to put you under an obligation to the army for defending you, I’m not so bloody unfair. You haven’t asked to be defended, you don’t want to be, and I suppose it makes me your enemy, in a way, as much as Hitler is. I’m only trying to explain how some of our lot think.”